Clunie Reid

Take No Photographs, Leave Only Ripples

Clunie Reid approaches the junk food menu of consumer culture with bulimic gusto: gluttonously binging on the whole of mass media only to regurgitate it, macerated and comically bilious. The more she consumes, the leaner her work gets, distilling the very essence of pop consciousness. Using the photographic image as both her subject and media, Reid takes pictures of advertisements, newspapers, magazines, TV, and the internet, things she finds on the street, things in her studio; she even re-photographs her photos. She makes collages and drawings on them, scrawls absurd logos, spontaneous retorts to the camera’s neatly packaged imagery. And then she re-photographs them again. “The images are not enclosed thematically,” Reid says of Take No Photographs..., “they were chosen because of how they can be played off each other. I’m interested in advertising, the way in which images of bodies and objects have a relationship to the way our view of the world is constructed. By vulgarising this imagery, my work explores the hidden mechanics of image construction, highlighting things which are implicit in media.”